7/31 It’s definitely not the end of history: In Policy Review, Yale’s Robert Kagan on the return of history.
7/28 “Woolworth was 100 years ago what Wal-Mart is today”: Joshua Zeitz on how Woolworth grew and then had to die. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
7/27 Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, authors of Why Truth Matters (2006), diagnose postmodernism’s descent into intellectual adolescence. (Via David Thompson.) And here is Roger Donway’s review of Why Truth Matters.
7/26 Fantastic: Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrates Microsoft’s cool new Photosynth program. (Via Grant McCracken.)
7/25 Steven Pinker in praise of dangerous ideas. And there are a few dangerous ideas in Protagoras’s recent reading list.
7/24 Entrepreneurship and Generation Y. (Via Jeff Cornwall.) Here are ten signs that you might be an entrepreneur. And, since
perfect timing doesn’t exist, start channeling the Nike commercial and just do it.
7/23 Now I don’t feel so bad about my email backlog: Here is God’s inbox. And here’s a good graphic of the world’s distribution of religious belief.
7/21 Foreign policy round-up: In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Carlin Romano asks: What should we call the terrorists? In The Daily Mail, Hassan Butt reflects upon his time as a member of the British Jihadi network. In The Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby confronts the dreaded M-word. And in The Wall Street Journal, Randy Barnett delineates conflicts within libertarianism about the Iraq war. Update: Barnett follows up with more here.
7/20 Chomsky versus Pinker: In The New Yorker, a “bombshell” thesis about the Pirahã and universal grammar. (Thanks to Joe H. for the link.)
7/19 Stephen Browne has three compact and pithy lessons from history. And Peter Cresswell plugs for Jonah Goldhagen’s explanation for two millennia of European anti-Semitism. And generalizing to the movement of history in general: What role do philosophical ideas play? Robert Tracinski has a good discussion of the major issues—and the complicating factors. My introduction to this fascinating field is here: What Moves History.
7/18 List mania: Here are ten amazing facts about the Earth, the results of an international web-poll on seven wonders of the world—along with fourteen other popular choices—and Discover magazine’s choice of the seven most exciting moments in science.
7/17 Economist Russell Sobel’s Unleashing Capitalism—a fine set of state-level policy recommendations for West Virginia that could profitably be applied in all fifty states. Jeff Cornwall has this datum on the worldwide entrepreneurial boom. Uzodinma Iweala makes a plea on how not to save Africa. (Via InstaPundit) And the BusinessPundit has an anecdote about changing with the times and how a C paper became an A paper.
7/16 The Manhattan Institute’s new sub-site devoted to reforming higher education. (Via Protagoras.)
Race, culture, and personal choices and commitment—is education a “whites only” value? A report on the problem of under-achieving black students in wealthy school districts. And Nelson Hultberg reflects on nature, nurture, and choice: Womb-Seekers and Misguided Idealists.
7/10 Free the New Youth 4 and Kareem Amer: a website devoted to the freeing and the free-speech causes of Chinese and Egyptian political prisoners. (Via Agoraphilia.) And as Arts & Letters Daily puts it, “The body count among Russian reporters is now thirteen murders since Putin came to power. In each case the reporter was working on a story critical of government or business officials.”
7/9 New York University economics professor William Easterly has some welcome good news from Africa. And here is a quirky but fascinating political piece from South African and Australian author J. M. Coetzee’s forthcoming novel. (Thanks to Tibor for the link.)
7/8 “Black Button”: a good The Matrix-meets-Christian-morality-play video. (Thanks to Beverly for the link.)
7/7 Radical Islamists hate him. So do leftists. And evangelical Christians led the battle to deny him tenure. This guy must be doing something right. (Thanks to Bob H. for the link.)
7/5 Yikes: more data on the divide between the sciences and the humanities. You can’t be an educated person without knowing some literature, but when will we stop thinking of the scientifically illiterate as educated too? And what about the politically and economically illiterate? Bryan Caplan’s new book probes the issue of whether democracy is self-defeating.
7/3 Reason‘s Tim Hartford on why poor countries are poor.
7/2 Martin Firrell’s coolly passionate public art project. (Thanks to Kristen for the link.)